The mud tasted like copper.
And fear.
It was fitting, Silas Vane thought, that his life would end not with a roar of glory, up on the walls of the Citadel, but here, face down in the slop of Trench 404, choking on a mouthful of dirt.
Above him, the sky wasn't just burning… it was screaming. Great streaks of gold and crimson tore through the clouds. The **"Divine Arts"** of the High Gods clashing with the **"Abyssal Flames"** of the Demon Kings. It was a celestial tantrum that made the very air vibrate, shattering glass in the villages ten miles away.
To the soldiers dying in the trenches, it looked like the apocalypse.
To the entities fighting up there, it was probably just a Tuesday.
*BOOM.*
A shockwave flattened the trench. The sound was so loud it didn't register as noise—it registered as a physical punch to the gut. Silas felt his eardrums pop, a wet, warm sensation trickling down his neck. He tried to move his legs, to scramble back toward the bunker, but his body refused to answer.
His legs were gone.
They were buried under the rubble of the **Sector 4 Signal Tower** - a useless pile of ancient stone that High Command had sworn was "strategically vital."
*Vital,* Silas thought, watching his own blood pool in the craters left by magical artillery. The liquid was dark, mixing with the trench water. Steam rose from it, curling into the cold air like a bad joke. *We died for a cairn of rocks.*
"Mama..."
The voice came from his left. Silas turned his head, the vertebrae grinding like gravel.
It was **Toby**. The kid was sixteen. He had lied about his age to join the 3rd Supply Division because the recruiters promised him a pair of boots. He was wearing them now. One of them was twitching.
"It's okay, Toby," Silas wheezed, blood bubbling past his parched lips. "Just... close your eyes. The shift is over."
Toby didn't close his eyes. He stared up at the burning sky, his face frozen in a rictus of terror. A stray beam of Holy Light—probably a "healing" spell meant for a Paladin—had missed its target and vaporized the kid's chest.
Silas looked away.
"Pathetic," he whispered.
He wasn't a hero. He wasn't some Chosen One from the prophecies. He was **Silas Vane**, a 40-year-old strategist for the Western Kingdom's 3rd Supply Division. He wasn't a powerful mage. He was a logistics officer. He had spent his life plotting supply routes that avoided dragon nests, bribing corrupt nobles for grain, and calculating exactly how many soldiers they could afford to lose to starvation before the front lines collapsed.
He was a bean counter in a war of gods.
And now, the ledger was closed.
He saw his Commander, a man named **Draven** who had once bragged about dining with a Duke, standing on the edge of the trench. Draven was screaming orders into a communication crystal that had been dead for an hour.
"Hold the line!" Draven shrieked. "For the Glory of the Saint!"
A shadow fell over him. Not a cloud. A **Seraph**.
The winged creature descended from the clouds, indifferent as a hawk. It didn't even attack Draven. It just landed. The shockwave of its arrival turned the Commander into a red mist.
There was no scream. Just a flash of gold feathers, and then a silhouette burnt into the mud where a man had stood a second before.
*"The Gods protect us,"* the Church preached in the capital.
*"The Demons purge the weak,"* the Cults chanted in the sewers.
"Fuck them," Silas whispered, his voice failing as his lungs filled with fluid. "It's all... just a game. We're just pawns... and they're flipping the board."
A shadow fell over him.
A **Scavenger Demon**—a low-rank imp with jagged claws and eyes like burning coals—scuttled over the lip of the trench. It sniffed at Toby's body, then turned toward Silas. It grinned, revealing rows of needle-teeth.
Silas didn't close his eyes. He didn't have the strength to fight, but he had the strength to hate.
He glared past the demon, at the ruined foundation of the Signal Tower. The shelling had cracked the ancient casing of the obelisk. Under the grey stone, something was glowing.
Not gold. Not the white fire of Holy Light.
But a shifting, sand-colored energy that defied the red sky. It looked like liquid time.
**The Heart of Chronos.**
Legends whispered of a Forgotten God - **Chronos** - who was murdered by the Seven Pillars for trying to give humans the power of causality. This tower... it wasn't a signal. It was his *tomb*. And the war, in all its chaotic stupidity, had just cracked it open.
*So this is what we died for?* Silas thought, a sense of cosmic irony bubbling in his chest. *A grave robbery at the end of the world?*
The Scavenger Demon lunged.
At the same moment, a stray bolt of Abyssal Lightning struck the tower.
The energy inside the tomb pulsed. It wasn't warm. It was cold—the absolute, terrified zero of a void between seconds. It rushed out, a silent wave of negation.
It hit the demon. The imp didn't burn. It *un-happened*. It turned into an embryo, then a cell, then nothing.
Then the wave hit Silas.
A single, fractured line of text appeared in his dying vision.
**[Paradox Engine Initiated.]**
**[User: Silas Vane.]**
**[Status: Deceased.]**
**[Error: Soul is incompatible with current timeline.]**
**[Solution: RELOAD.]**
The light swallowed him. The pain of burning flesh vanished, replaced by the sensation of being pulled backward through a straw. The roar of the apocalypse faded into a high-pitched whine.
He saw the world dissolve. The trench became mud. The mud became stone. The stone became clouds. The sky un-burned so fast it looked like a strobe light.
**[Rewinding... 10 Years...]**
**[Rewinding... 20 Years...]**
Then, silence.
***
*Tick.*
It was the first sound he heard. A rhythm. Precise. Mechanical sound.
*Tick.*
*Tick.*
Silas gasped, his eyes flying open. His hands flew to his throat, expecting to feel the crush of rubble, the claws of the demon.
Smooth skin.
No beard stubble.
No scar from the shrapnel wound.
He sat up, the sheets pooling around his waist. He wasn't in a trench. He was in a bed with crisp white linens that scratched against his skin. The air smelled of antiseptic, beeswax, and... lavender?
Lavender. The smell of the rich.
He looked at the window. The light streaming through wasn't the red glare of the apocalypse; it was the soft, golden morning sun of the **Era of Peace**.
He looked at his hands. They were small. Uncalloused. The ink stain on his index finger—from hours of writing supply reports—was gone.
These were the hands of a sixteen-year-old boy.
"Heart rate stabilizing," a voice said.
"What the fuck is happening??", he wondered.
He then jerked his head. The movement made him dizzy.
A nurse in the pristine white-and-gold habit of the **Church of Mercy** was checking a mana-monitor next to his bed. She looked bored. She was chewing on a peppermint stick.
"You gave us quite a scare, Cadet Vane," she said, not looking up from her chart. "Mana exhaustion during the entrance ceremony? You really should know your limits before you try to impress the nobles."
Silas stared at her. He knew her.
**Matron Hallow.**
A stern woman who smelled faintly of old bleach. She was famous for her strictness. She died in the first week of the war, crushed when the Infirmary roof collapsed under a hail of goblin fire. Silas had seen her body being pulled from the wreckage.
But as he looked at her face now, he didn't just see the nurse.
There was a flicker. A glitch in the rendering of the world.
For a split second, her face wasn't smooth. It was a skull, jaw unhinged, eye sockets burning with holy fire. The image overlayed her living face like a bad double exposure—a ghost from a future that hadn't happened yet.
Silas blinked, rubbing his eyes. The corpse vanished. Matron Hallow was just a woman again, frowning at a smudge on her chart.
"I..." His voice cracked. It was high, youthful. Too clean. "What year is it?"
The nurse sighed, the sound like dry leaves. She tapped the calendar on the wall with a long, bony finger. "Disorientation is normal. Mana Exhaustion scrambles the short-term memory. It's **Year 998, Month of the Sun.** You're in the Royal Academy Infirmary."
Year 998.
Silas did the math instantly. It was a habit.
Current Year: 998.
Death Year: 1022.
*Twenty-four years,* he thought, the number heavy in his mind. *They sent me back twenty-four years!!!*
He had ten years of peace before the sky opened. Ten years before the First Gate collapsed. Ten years before he was conscripted into the meat grinder. And another fourteen years of hell after that.
He looked around the room. It was peaceful. A bird was singing outside. A First Year student in the bed next to him was sleeping, clutching a teddy bear.
*They don't know,* Silas realized. *None of them know they're already dead.*
Silas looked at the clock on the wall. It was an old brass thing, ticking loudly in the silence.
*Tick.*
*Tick.*
*Ti—*
It stopped.
Not hovered. *Stopped.*
The dust motes in the sunbeam froze mid-dance. Matron Hallow's blink halted halfway, her eyelids utterly still. The bird song outside cut out, sliced into silence.
The sound of the world was replaced by a low, grinding vibration in his skull—like tectonic plates shifting against bone.
A jagged, broken window fractured the air in front of his eyes.
**[CRITICAL ALERT]**
**[Timeline Deviation Detected.]**
**[Status: VISIBLE.]**
The text flashed red. Not a warning. A threat.
*Visible.*
Silas didn't know what it meant, but he felt it. A cold, heavy pressure settled on his chest, as if a giant eye had just opened in the ceiling and was staring directly at him.
His heart hammered against his ribs—a frantic, terrified rhythm. *Thump-thump-thump.*
**[Warning: Heart Rate Elevated. Probability of Detection: Rising.]**
The water in the pitcher next to his bed didn't just ripple. It *hissed*, freezing instantly into a block of jagged ice. The glass cracked with a sharp *ping*.
*Calm down,* Silas screamed internally. *Die. Kill the fear. You are a corpse. Corpses don't panic.*
The nurse's eyes were starting to move again. The glitch was ending. If she saw the ice—if she saw a First Circle cadet freezing water without a spell—she would call the Inquisition. Anomaly. Heretic. Demon.
He had 0.5 seconds.
He didn't use mana. He didn't cast a spell. He reached into the cold, traumatic logic of his forty years as a strategist. He remembered the cold of the trenches. He remembered the feeling of being dead.
He *pushed* his terror down, locking it into a mental box with sheer, brutal willpower.
*Snap.*
The nurse finished her blink. "—name?" she finished her sentence, as if no time had passed.
She looked at Silas.
Then she looked at the cracked pitcher.
The ice was gone. The water was liquid again, leaking onto the table.
"Oh," she frowned, seeing the puddle. "Must have been a hairline fracture in the glass. Cheap supplies. The Budget Committee is cutting corners again."
She wiped it up with a rag, completely ignoring the impossibility of a pitcher cracking itself.
Silas let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He looked at the air where the red text had been. It was fading, leaving only a faint headache behind.
*Visible,* he thought. *Whatever brought me back... it has a cost. The world knows I shouldn't be here.*
"My name is Silas Vane," he said, his voice steady, stripped of all fear. It was the voice of a liar. "And I'm feeling much better."
The nurse smiled—and for a second, the burning skull flickered over her face again.
"Good," she said. "Headmaster Eldric wants to see you. Apparently, fainting during the ceremony is... memorable."
Silas swung his legs out of bed. He felt the weak, unconditioned muscles of his teenage body. He felt the terrifying fragility of his situation. He was a Level 1 weakling in a world of Level 100 monsters.
"Hey, Nurse?" Silas asked, turning back to her.
"It's Matron Hallow to you, Cadet."
"Right. Matron Hallow. Hypothetical question. If you knew a storm was coming... a storm that would wash all of this away... what would you do?"
She paused, looking at him with a mix of confusion. She smoothed her apron, a nervous tic. Then she snorted. "I'd buy an umbrella, Vane. Now get out. The floor needs scrubbing and I have real patients to attend to."
Silas grinned. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the jagged, predatory smile of a man who knew he was the only wolf in a room full of sheep.
"An umbrella," he chuckled. "Right. I'll need a big one. Maybe made of iron."
He walked out of the infirmary, leaving the smell of lavender behind. As he stepped into the hallway, the noise of the Academy washed over him—students laughing, magic crackling, the bustle of a thousand lives unaware of the countdown clock above their heads.
He looked at a group of First Years walking past.
He saw their corpses.
He saw the hallway burning.
He saw the sky tearing open.
He closed his eyes and breathed in, clutching the three copper coins in his pocket.
*I won't save it,* he thought, touching the cold metal. *I'm going to buy it.*
***